#and there's this whole thing about making choices and living with the consequences

[amoebab22]

I completely agree with this. I feel like this is one of the worst parts about Veilguard. My Inky is in the South, and while I firmly believe Orlais is the devil, it's very weird that Tevinter is just super chill about my elf Rook when my elf Inky had constant micro-aggressions as well as just out and out slurs hurled at her. Also I'm going on a rant about Mythal.

SPOILERS BELOW

Bellara also seems to just...kind of ignore that I'm an elf? Davrin makes more sense. He left his clan and joined the Wardens because he just didn't really vibe with the Dalish. He'd think of himself as a Warden first, I think. Wardens don't seem to give much of a shit about your race or religion or sexuality or whatever. In The Calling, they canonically don't give a fuck about the gay couple in their little group, or that Fiona is a mage and an elf. Absolutely irrelevant. So Davrin could start to fall into that mindset because frankly, it's a nice way to live. It's just not real outside the Wardens.

So when Bellara is like oh my god our gods are evil and Davrin is like eh, fuck 'em, that's actually about the most realistic reaction we've got re: elves. Davrin is just out here like yo I'm a little busy saving the world fuck them gods. Love Davrin.

Also, in Inquisition, there's concern that knowing Corypheus's artifact is Elvhen will cause violence against elves. So knowing it's the Elvhen gods causing all of this? The consequences of that, even if an elf Rook saves the world, should be looming for a Shadow Dragon in particular. Clearly Inquisitor Ameridan's race did nothing for the elves of Orlais. It was covered up over time. His sacrifice meant nothing to the humans. This should make Solas's plans to restore the elves much, much more tempting.

The way the Crows were presented REALLY bothered me as well as someone who romanced Zev. The Crows *tortured* him, sexually assaulted him, made him feel worthless, because it was seen as necessary. Sure, Lucanis being blood family might give him a very different perspective and experience, but Jacobus is just allowed to be a Crow and start his own house when he wouldn't kill? I mean, I totally agree that prolonged, public shaming and imprisonment is worse for this individual, but like.... That's not how the Crows work. They kill stuff for money. Sure, they run Antiva and would be pretty pissed off about the Antaam taking their territory I'm sure, and they might work with Rook since Rook helped Lucanis and he's a big deal to the First Talon. But like... It should be a hard choice to work with them for Shadow Dragon Rook, because SLAVERY.

I feel like the pullback on slavery is to make Solas's actions seem more ambiguous, and to make it seem like there was some equal power between him and Mythal. But I have a very hard time believing he was never Mythal's slave. Also, a spirit of BENEVOLENCE? Get ABSOLUTELY fucked. She was fine with SLAVERY. Thought she could just slowly phase it out, maybe. Yeah, no .

Because here's the thing: slavery is evil. Whatever you have to do to stop slavery, short of participating or killing slaves, is pretty easy to justify. Maybe I'm just John Brown-pilled from living in Kansas a good chunk of my life, but killing slavers and slave owners and freeing slaves is MORALLY CORRECT. FULL STOP. A "kind" master is still a master. Sure, you can give them a chance to free their slaves and make reparations first, but waiting to vote slavery out didn't work. The US had to go to war. Haiti had to rebel (and give basically all its GDP to France for like two hundred years. Fuck Orlais AND France).

The only reason my Inky was able to befriend Dorian, at first, was their shared trauma in going to the future. That changes people (that whole quest fucked me up the first time I did it) and I think my elf Inky was looking for reasons to trust Dorian and ignore the system he participated in. She didn't have to see it so it seemed less real. He's an altus so he doesn't own the estate. He seems open to other opinions! And some part of him knows it's wrong, or he wouldn't be so awkward upon talking to Inky the first time.

But Solas's inherent and never fully overcome distrust of Dorian isn't wrong. Solas needs to see action; words aren't enough. I don't blame him.

This is the same softening we saw of the Templars in DA2 and Inquisition, but if you read The Stolen Throne and The Calling and play DAO, it's very clear that mages are oppressed by the Chantry and live in horrible conditions. The ones in Lake Calenhad are described as pale and kinda sickly looking (or something like that) because they don't get any fucking sunlight. Fiona is happy to go to the circle at first because she was a SLAVE in Orlais (Honestly Loghain's hatred of Orlais is justified even though his actions aren't). If you decide to allow the right of annulment or whatever in DAO, Zevran calls it genocide. Zevran isn't one to mince words. He doesn't pretend he isn't a killer or that he wasn't tortured.

My Inky and my Rook are both 'no gods no masters' types, which is why I think clan Lavellan sent their First on a risky mission supposedly by herself (got real sick of her shit lol). As a result, she heavily sympathizes with Solas's cause, and would have happily joined him in bringing down the Veil if he'd just agreed to spend time making sure as few people died as possible, particularly after she meets the Avvar and sees how spirits really are. She knows Solas better than anyone, and even without a full explanation, she'd know that his reasons for doing this were morally right. He freed her people. He never meant to hurt them. He can't live with his guilt. Inky (who in my game was more like 30 because I don't think she could have made decisions or led on her own at 20, nor would she have been a studied enough mage) wants freedom for everyone. She's chaotic good.

Rook is a Shadow Dragon who killed slavers a little too hard for an organization dedicated to killing slavers (based Rook). They're also chaotic good, and a bit of an idiot, bless them, who kinda sees everything as a nail because they have a hammer. They see slavery, they fight it. Fuck the consequences. Solas did the same.

So why is Rook not bringing up slavery a lot? Why is Rook only finding out that Solas freed slaves on the regular at the beginning of the game? Did Varric just decide that wasn't worth bringing up to a person whose entire life revolves around ending slavery? Why is Rook not having an existential crisis after talking to Solas and finding out the truth of his past in his memories?

Look, all I'm saying is that I don't understand why more people aren't angry with Mythal and why no one is talking about slavery and racism. The whole point of fantasy and sci-fi, and the point of Dragon Age, is to critique modern society through thinly veiled references. That's why people get so passionate about Star Trek. And yeah, yes, it's necessarily going to make a piece of media more niche, or people are going to bitch about it (especially gamer bros my dude calm down, sorry something is very briefly not about you), but it makes a game *good* and lasting

BG3 did a good job of exploring the themes of trauma and power imbalance, and while some characters I think needed more fleshing out (Wyll my beloved, I owe you a lengthy fanfic for the injustice done to you), it was particularly powerful in Astarion. The people are ready for real exploration of real issues. We always have been. Backing off was a mistake.

ANYWAY I have feelings and none of my friends share my special interest. Here you go.

Why Fenris could Never Cameo in Dragon Age: The Veilguard

In the run up to Dragon age: The Veilguard, I was almost certain that Fenris would be our main legacy character from previous games. Not only has he been central in the comics released between DAI and DATV, he is an escaped Tevinter slave who's plot revolved around magisters, magic and the structural prejudices surrounding elves in Thedas. Not only that, but he's canonically in Tevinter killing slavers currently so he's geographically in the right place for us to meet him.

About halfway through the game though, it was clear to me: Fenris could never cameo in The Veilguard. Because he'd break it.

How the Veilguard treats Thedas is...odd to me, to say the least. I will be writing another post about how much I adored the expanded big lore in this game (the titans, ancient elves were spirits, where the blight came from etc.) and yet while these large lore expansions worked for me, the actual culture of modern Thedas is entirely softened, its sharp edges filed down until it's a sanitised fantasy world devoid of what made the franchise so vibrant and compelling in the first place.

So let's start with Fenris and slavery. In all three games, the reality of slavery is pushing at the corners of the world. In DAO Loghain allows Tevinter Magisters to enslave elves in order to raise money for his war effort. In DA2 Fenris is fighting to be free from slavers who will not leave him be, let alone the reminders that the city was built by slaves which are everywhere. In DAI one of the two possible mini-bosses is Calpurnia who was a slave, and characters such as Gatt and Dorian both show us how much slavery is tied into Tevinters culture and success.

But DATV the first game actually set in Tevinter where we get to see the famed Minrathous...it's like the game purposefully wants to avoid the issue. I can feel it tilting the camera away to not allow me to see. Slavery is mentioned, but never talked about in depth or as a specifically ELVEN problem in Tevinter. This might have been done to be less problematic, it feels ignored.

We are in DOCK TOWN. We are at the DOCKS. You would think that slaves from all over Thedas who are being smuggled and bought by various groups would be everywhere. You would think that the injustice in dock town would be partly built on the back of ships we've seen in the comics crammed with elves in chains. This is the world Dragon age set up for us. And yet...nothing. zilch. A tiny easily skippable side quest where we free a couple of venatori slaves, but only one of whom is an elf.

None of our Tevinter characters seem to have been influenced by their culture even a little bit when it comes to how they view elves; there is no moment when Neve fucks up and says something prejudiced, no moment when Bellara or Davrin are distrustful of her for being a Tevinter mage.

The same goes for Zevran; a character who epitomised the issues with the crows. The crows have consistently been characterised as very morally dubious assassins who kill for the highest bidder and who buy children on the slave market and torture them as they grow in order to assure that they reach maturity able to withstand torture without giving away a client's name. Zevran is very explicit about the fact that if you fail a contract your life is forefit.

Nobody responds particularly to you if you're an elf. Nobody trusts rook less for it in Tevinter. Nobody treats Rook any differently. Even DAI had better mechanics for this; with nobles in Orlais less likely to trust you as an elf.

Considering one of the main plot points of this game and what makes Solas sympathetic is the fact that he was fighting against the slavery of ancient elves...you'd think the game might want to mirror that in modern Thedas. It might want to show us how characters fighting to end slavery in Tevinter are similar to Solas and how the society Solas fought against was similar to the one that characters we love such as Fenris have fought against in modern Thedas. Maybe we'd want to explore how in a world of slavery like this, how could the answer NOT be to tear it all down? Maybe we should have that option at the end of the game so it really can chose whether we agree with Solas and his plans or not.

Adding Fenris to this game would entirely break the game because Fenris refuses to allow you to look away from this horror. He is a sympathetic character who had to learn to trust mages again because of course he didn't trust them. Of course he didn't. Fenris wouldn't allow the camera to shift focus because he's literally covered in the lyrium scars that show how slaves are used as experiments in Tevinter. Fenris WOULD question Neve on how she feels about elves and slaves. Fenris WOULD have things to say about Lucanis and the crows (let alone the fact Lucanis is an abomonation). So he could never be in this game; he'd drop a bomb on it's carefully constructed blinders to the very society its supposed to be set in.

And yet, in DATV, the crows are presented as...a found family of misfits and orphans? The politician who opposes the crows having absolute power in Antiva is framed as a comically evil idiot who doesn't understand that the crows are ontologically good. Yet...they're NOT. Crows in this game act more like a secret rebel group than an assassin organisation. We see no crow taking contracts with the VERY RICH venatori magisters despite being hired killers. We see crows just refuse to kill people despite having a contract because 'its crueler to leave them alive'. The crows don't feel like the crows here, they feel like a softened version of a cool assassin group who are cool because they wear black and purple.

Our pirate group are also sanitised; the Lords of Fortune are good pirates who only steal treasure that's not culturally significant. Theyve clearly read the modern critiques of the British Museum and have decided to explicitly stop anyone levelling similar critiques at them. There is no faction of the Lords of Fortune who aren't like this, no internal arguments about it. Everyone just. Agrees. And is able to accurately tell what a cultural artifact is vs. what treasure that you can have yourself is. Rather than showing us why a pirate stealing cultural artifacts might be bad (like in da2 where such a situation literally causes a coup and a war) it just tells us it's bad. But also pirates are cool so we still want them in our world.

This issue seaps into Thedas and drains it of any of the interesting complexity and ability to SAY anything that this franchise had before this game. It becomes a game about telling and not showing rather than the other way around. The games have ALWAYS asked questions about oppressive structural systems and their interplay with society, religion and culture and how these things can affect even the most well meaning character. Dragon age at its best IS a game about society and how society functions both for and against it's characters and what happens to societies built on cruelty and indifference. The best bad guys dragon age has given us are those who are bad because they embody these systems or have been shaped by them. Our main characters have had to wrestle with questions surrounding how to exist in these systems, fight against them, learn and grow.

Yet every group you come across in DATV is sanitised and cleaned up to the point of being as non problematic as humanly possible. None of our cast of characters have to wrestle with where they came from or the world that shaped them. None of them have to confront their own biases. They start the game perfectly non-problematic and end it that way too.

And this just...isn't what Dragon Age has been in the past. It isn't why I love the franchise. The whole game just felt, in a way, hollow. And this was a CHOICE and it is why the legacy characters are few and far between. Too many dragon age characters are just too...angry and complex for this game. You can feel them pulling their punches on this one. I have to imagine they did this because they didn't want to be criticised or have too much controversy? But I think it honestly goes far too much in the other direction and just makes it bland.

I can't imagine what I say here will be unique, but it is the basis for a LOT of my other thoughts on this game so I wanted to get it out of the way first. The softened Thedas and characters make this game by far the weakest in the franchise.

[beets-are-not-green]

i just finished watching buffy s1-s7 for the first time and like. s6 is good. not perfect, but still. it deals in the most obvious way with these big issues that are so human, and it's so real that even the season's vilains are kind-of-regular humans. the way it focuses on the characters' relationships, the way they grow, the way they hurt each other, the way they deal with becoming adults, with trying to have some control on life, on themselves, on each other, the way they fail, the way they have to deal with the consequences of their actions in the end... it was so interesting that i was even willing to go along with what i thought were bad writing choices, like: ok, that's awful but you know what, sure, let's see where we're going. and then s7 happens lmfao

[pepprs]

ok hi. not to be stupid about this publicly once again but it’s 5:34 am [update it is now 5:53 am] and i have gotten absolutely HORRIBLE sleep tonight. first bc i was so stressed that i couldn’t fall asleep until 1:30am. then because my sister is sleeping in our room again (long story) which is good for her bc she’s making progress w her ocd but it means that she comes in with h the flashlight on after 2am and has to check the room and she leaves the bedroom door wide open which distorts the white noise from the sojnd machine which is right in front of my bed. and she’s like laughing at stuff on her phone too so all the subtleties of sound and light disrupt me and wake me up and throw me off. and also it’s freakishly hot so i woke up a couple times bc of that. and now im awake at 5:30ish after barely sleeping for 4 hours bc im stressed bc it’s Passover and my moms bday and im leaving work early today and tomorrow for the “””””Seder””””” (which again literally is not a seder it’s just dinner w my grandpa) and barely have time to get anything done at work and haven’t done anything for my mom and have to clean the house for my grandpa to come over and we literally don’t even have a dinner table yet likr idkw aht the fuck we’re going to do.. and also im fucking STARVING. because guess what!!!! we have to stop eating bread!!!! and i usually have 4 slices with avocado / guac on them before i go to sleep but there were only 4 slices left in the whole house so i had 2 so my brother will get to have the other 2 during the day. and my stomach is howling rn. and we have other things to eat like fruit and stuff but nothing that’s not going to throw me off.. like im not about to eat an orange at 5:30am it’s going to set my throat on fire with the acid this early in the morning. and we don’t have any snack foods in this house or like anything that can be made without having to prepare it for a while bc of our diet (lol). and we don’t have any flatbread or tortillas or whatever yet. so im going fucking crazy and feeling resentful abt passover again and wondering what the hell im going to do going into work and not being able to eat bagels for breakfast after not being able to eat my bedtime snack and being this hungry and stressed and miserable for a week on top of everything else. lol

[nostalgicmiscellaneous]

This fandom created a myth about Lady Whistledown. Sometimes i wonder if i watched the same show. Let me make myself clear: While Penelope has to tell Colin the truth, because she loves him and he deserves it, LW helped the Bridgertons a lot actually. It saved them to have Daphne married to a creep ( and see how Violet wanted people to talk to reach LW and spread), saved Colin from a loveless marriage with children that he didn't know anything about it and saved Eloise. Yes, it saved Eloise. Eloise created and kept pushing the situation in her reckless pursuit. Eloise also didn't think about the consequences of her action towards the people working for LW, didn't listen to Penelope, didn't think about the risk she was putting people at. And while i understand her anger in not knowing, had she been a better friend, many other things would be different, because she truly never paid attention to what Penelope feels or want, she molded Pen to be whom she wanted and be her audience. And then, she left Pen with the choice of losing all she built and suffer consequences or pick the less harmful option: to make Eloise's scandal about politics, not romantic and save them both, plus Theo. The real ruin for Eloise would've been her being caught with Theo, something that was bound to happen as she was not careful at all. Why should Pen sacrifice all for Eloise? Would any of you sacrifice all ( job, family and possibly your liberty) for a friend who caused the bloody situation? I'm no hypocrite, i know i wouldnt. Not to mention Eloise bravado, to Pen she would say she wants to challenge society and doesn't care about what they think...but folded the moment she received a frown from the Ton. Shall we see who are LW victims, people that suffered real consequences? Lord Beerbrock. That's it. Marina is married, despite her lies and deceit. Colin? Nothing as well, in fact, happier than ever. Eloise? A few weeks of ostracism and she's back without a problem, without a romantic entanglement to ruin her. One that she clearly didn't really thought was deep enough to face society. The Bridgertons have more to thank LW than to hate her. And Violet and Anthony, i bet your asses, do think so, and see it. And The Queen? Are you watching the show? Have you seen Charlotte's personality? That woman loves the whole game with LW. And She loves to take it all, to receive the laurels of that society. As long as she can make it look like the won, and she can, easily, by revealing or be involved in revealing who is LW. See the whole KatexEdwina, how she handled the Ton there.

Anyway, just wanted to say something because some people have dreamed a LW that doesn't exist at all. Created on their own minds a boogeyman that wasn't simply reporting the truth with witty opinions but fabricating stories and lies to ruin lives, and that's simply not true. Never happened. There was never a lie created there. Only the truth, even about herself, as Pen was often damaged by her column.

[maxdibert]

And that is precisely the worst reason, because just as they could choose to exercise violence, they could also choose not to, but they opted for the first choice. We can’t forget the reason behind that power: their power came from the lack of consequences for their actions and the certainty that there would be no serious repercussions. James and Sirius knew they could attack Severus because he was someone without a family name, blood status, or financial resources. No one was going to defend him, no one cared about him, he wasn’t important among his peers, and he didn’t have present parents. He had no money, no influence—he was a nobody.

And they weren’t nobodies. They had all of that. James knew his parents would do anything for him, and while Sirius came from a bad household, Walburga would never have allowed her son to be humiliated—even if only to flaunt the power of the Black family and preserve their image. They had a safety net; Severus didn’t. So they could do whatever they wanted to him. If that hadn’t been the case, they would’ve picked on Mulciber or Rosier or any other Slytherin. But they didn’t—because they couldn’t. Those kids came from good families with resources, and their actions would’ve had consequences. So James and Sirius weren’t interested. Sure, they might’ve played a prank on them once or insulted them, but there was no prolonged bullying, no targeted abuse, because if they’d done that, they’d have gotten into trouble. With Severus, they had free rein—and that’s the most sinister part of it all: they went after him because he was defenseless.

They could have chosen not to do it. They could’ve been like many other popular boys and girls with social influence who don’t go out of their way to torment others. They could’ve chosen not to be violent, but they didn’t want to. I was part of a popular group in my school, and there were kids with a lot of money whose parents were important people, and they didn’t go around tormenting anyone. People can choose not to be terrible human beings—especially people like James, who had no trauma or underlying reasons to explain his behavior beyond being a violent, narcissistic jerk.

James was raised in a loving, progressive family, surrounded by care and privilege. His duty was to choose not to be violent, yet he decided to become a despicable, classist bully. Even Sirius has a backstory that makes his sociopathic tendencies somewhat understandable, but James? He’s just a fragile, egotistical jerk who couldn’t stand someone else getting close to the girl he liked, and because that someone turned out to be an easy target, he chose to torture him—even after he “got” the girl. Honestly, I find him a despicable character in every sense.

I also completely agree with everything you said. When people talk about Severus being resentful and violent, they tend to equate him with James and this supposed “change” James underwent that we never see or have any evidence of. But people often forget what I said earlier: James had no reason to be a jerk. His whole life was easy. He was filthy rich, adored by his parents, and after finishing school, he no longer ran into Severus in the halls, so he had no one to torment.

Meanwhile, Severus faced violence at home and at school. He endured teachers (the people responsible for his well-being) ignoring the bullying he suffered, even telling him to stay quiet when he was almost killed. He lived in a house full of supremacists as a half-blood, constantly having to prove he deserved to be there despite his status. He had no financial safety net to fall back on if things went wrong. He was groomed by members of a cult. He was groomed, emotionally manipulated, and had his insecurities and traumas exploited by Dumbledore. Very few people could have endured Severus’s life without ending up taking their own life.

People completely disregard his context. Sure, he had a horrible personality, but his life was horrible too. It’s not like he had many other options.

“I was bullied in school and didn’t turn out like Snape.”

Well, that argument works both ways. I was never bullied in school—in fact, I’d say I was part of a group of people considered “cool,” and not once in our lives did we go around picking on others, either verbally or physically. Nor were we going around drawing attention to ourselves with jokes that only appealed to the intellectually challenged. So, I don’t know, this whole “kids will be kids” thing doesn’t sit right with me because I was in that position, and I was never that childish. Neither were my friends. If we’re going to personalize the argument without considering the characters’ context, then let’s all do it, right?

The ironic part is that the same people who endlessly excuse the Marauders are exactly the kind of people the Marauders would have bullied relentlessly, and the fact that they genuinely don’t see it is… I don’t know whether to find it sad, pathetic, or both.

[cameatslemons]

mouthwashing post. jimmy is a raging narcissist and im tired of people trying to give him benefit of the doubt. his inability to see two feet beyond what immediately concerns him dooms everyone on the tulpar, and even in the end, he only really cares about himself.

big list of all his narcisstic bullshit below bc im here to motherfucking prove it (mouthwashing spoilers of course)

most obviously: everything is a personal attack on him. EVERYTHING. you can see it most clearly at the birthday party; while everyone else is understandably freaking out about being laid off, jimmy starts telling curly off and insulting both him and everyone else at the table, as if being laid off is a personal attack on jimmy specifically. it doesn’t matter that anya has nothing to go back to, that swansea’s life is thrown away- jimmy is the ONLY victim here, apparently. curly is personally responsible for getting laid off, in his eyes.

i don’t actually know the words for this but the way he’s constantly going “i have to do EVERYTHING around here”- again, feeling like its a personal attack to be asked anything at all. anya asks him to take care of curly because her entire fucking life is falling apart, its her end of days, but somehow shes the villain for struggling.

also the general antagonization of anya. she’s extremely competent for the hand she was dealt! shes too poor to attend med school yet shes very knoqledgable in medication and wound care! and yeah no shit shes struggling now, someone she cared deeply about is suffering immensely and now the ship is being “run” by a man who assaulted her. no fucking shit shes breaking down. but jimmy makes it clear time and time again that this is somehow her fault, all this shit of “shouldn’t nurses EARN their titles?” while she’s having a mental breakdown.

similarly, swansea being villainized for holding the cryopod for daisuke and killing him. like, i get it, but jimmy’s whole thing of saying he can fix daisuke is… c’mon man. he’s a hero to himself, he “always” fixes things the same way he “fixed” the ship, and he will fix daisuke and claim heroism even though it’s very clear nothing else can be done for him.

“someday you’ll thank me” while forcing curly to eat his own leg. the incredible confidence that he is in the right even when literally torturing someone.

MOST IMPORTANTLY: the final scene with curly burning. jimmy doesn’t earnestly believe he has anything to be sorry for. even when apologizing to curly he says “we can BOTH be heroes!” despite everything, he still thinks he’s in the right. he STILL thinks he’s a hero, because he’s right, he’s ALWAYS right, surely. he can apologize and grovel all he wants but in the end he still thinks he’s the hero of this story; he doesn’t genuinely think he has anything to right, he’s only doing this to be freed of consequence. and/or believes a simple “sorry” is enough, that it can fix completely ruining the lives of four people with his own inferiority complex.

i do think the choice to put curly in the pod instead of himself is the only time he recognizes his own guilt, if any. maybe it’s realizing that he DOES need something more than a simple “sorry” to even begin to try to fix things, maybe it’s that he thinks this will cement him even further as a hero. even then, does this fix anything? all it’s doing is making curly suffer more. is this actually a good thing?

to him, he’s the hero here. he always is. crashing the ship is a heroic thing, putting all his crewmates through hell is a heroic thing. all because something nobody can control is somehow a personal attack on jimmy.

not to mention all the “hallucinations” he has- it’s what he thinks should happen, it’s what he wants to hear. curly still calling him a friend, the dead corpses of his crewmates praising him, even in the final cutscene with curly burning where he says “no, YOU take the pod”. none of it’s real. it’s just what jimmy thinks is “right”. despite everything, he thinks everyone should thank and praise him, because he can do no wrong.

conclusion: jimmy is a narcisstic piece of shit.

[luna-azzurra]

Writing a Morally gray character

Think about their backstory, what shaped them into who they are? What do they believe in? And, most importantly, what pushes them to get out of bed every morning and keep going? These characters aren’t simple good or bad. They’re caught in the middle, in that murky, complicated space between black and white. That’s where they get interesting because they’re constantly wrestling with themselves, trying to figure out the right choice, or if the “right” choice even exists for them.

You need to show this internal battle. Imagine your character being torn between what they believe is morally right and what they actually want. This is where the real drama comes in, it’s like watching them juggle their principles with their desires in real-time. They’ll mess up, and they’ll make decisions that are sometimes questionable, but that’s what makes them human and relatable. One way to really highlight their complexity is by putting them in situations where there’s no clear answer. You know, those moments in life where everything’s kind of a mess, and you’re stuck trying to figure out what the hell you’re supposed to do? Your character should face situations like that. These gray areas create tension because readers won’t know which direction the character will go, and honestly, your character might not know either.

And don’t forget, growth is a huge part of writing a morally gray character. People aren’t static, they change based on what happens to them, and your character should too. Maybe they start off with a strong sense of morality but, over time, that starts to shift. Or maybe they start with shaky ethics and slowly become a better person as they learn from their mistakes. Growth can also go the other way, they could spiral downward, giving in to darker impulses. Either way, they need to evolve, just like people do in real life. That’s what keeps the story fresh and unpredictable. The last thing you want is a character that stays the same the whole way through.

Also, please, no stereotypes. A morally gray character doesn’t have to be a brooding anti-hero with a tragic past (unless that’s your vibe, but even then, switch it up). Give them quirks that make them unique. Maybe they have unexpected motivations, like they’re doing something shady for a cause they genuinely believe in, or they’ve got a weird sense of humor that throws people off. Whatever it is, make sure they feel like an individual, not just a copy-paste character we’ve all seen a million times.

Even when your character makes decisions that aren’t exactly clean-cut or heroic, the reader still needs to understand why. Show their vulnerabilities, why they doubt themselves, why they hesitate, and why they ultimately make the choices they do. It’s all about making them relatable, even when they’re walking that fine line between right and wrong. People might not always agree with them, but they should at least be able to see where they’re coming from.

And remember, every choice your character makes should have consequences. They don’t exist in a bubble. Their decisions should ripple out and affect not only them but the people around them. Maybe they make a selfish decision, and it ends up hurting someone they care about, or they try to do the right thing, and it blows up in their face. One last thing, just because your character lives in that gray area doesn’t mean they don’t have any sense of right or wrong. They might have their own personal code they follow, even if it doesn’t line up with society’s morals. Maybe they justify their actions in a way that makes sense to them, even if other people wouldn’t agree. It’s all about exploring that space where they’re not totally good, but not totally bad either. That’s where things get really interesting.

Think about where your character is going. Is their journey going to push them to become a better version of themselves? Will they fall back into old patterns and never really change? Or will they stay stuck in that moral gray zone, constantly torn between doing what’s right and doing what feels right for them?

[yelenasbraid]

the one I run to — joe burrow

summary — you’re out with your friends when you start to notice someone’s been watching you.

warnings — fem!reader, protective!joe, creepy guy, some suggestive comments, fluff, language, names used for friends’ names ( so sorry if i use yours! )

requested by — anon <3

YOU LOVED COOLER WEATHER. the soft breeze through your hair, the big sweaters and the hats. it brought back memories of college, of friends and the sweet times you had. those same college friends came up to see you, and you couldn’t be more excited.

“you literally haven’t aged,” one of your friends, cassandra, laughed as you sat down at a table. the restaurant you chose was a cute spot, warm lights dangled from the ceiling while the smell of wood filled your nostrils. it was one of your favorite places around town.

“cass, it’s been four years,” you defended, scooting in your chair.

“still, i feel like the stress of being a WAG would get the grey hairs going,” cass joked, earning an eye roll from you.

“i think i see some already,” your other friend, courtney, commented, going to point out said grey hairs. you smacked her hand away.

“you both are bullies. did you come up to ohio just to bully me?” you asked jokingly, making both girls laugh. both girls were your roommates at one point, and after that the three of you became fast friends. you did everything together in college, so graduating, knowing you were parting ways, made it ten times harder.

flashback

you embraced the two of them, tears stinging your eyes. you didn’t care about your makeup at this point; the three of you were going to be parting ways for who knows how long.

“you better text me,” courtney wiped her eyes as she playfully shoved you, “especially with you dating the golden boy,”

“oh hush,” you laughed, wrapping her in another hug. leaving would be the hardest thing for you. those girls showed you good people existed, that you were worthy of friendship. they were apart of you, and now it felt like time was ripping them away.

“we’ve gotta have like an annual catch up or something,” cass sniffled, pulling away from the embrace.

“you won’t be able to get rid of us,” you reassured.

end of flashback

you felt whole again with them there. this wasn’t to say that you weren’t friends with some of the WAGs on the bengals or that joe wasn’t enough. he was, and you were friends with some of the WAGs. you and jess, sam’s fiancée, were particularly close. it was just different with friends you’ve known for a lot longer.

you ordered your drinks and then your food choices.

“so, give me the tea,” courtney spoke, sipping on her wine.

“what tea is there?” you asked her. while you and joe kept your lives pretty private, everyone knew you were together. everyone knew that joe was absolutely smitten with you.

“oh come on, you’re dating joe burrow. there’s obviously some tea. and where’s that ring?”

“he hasn’t proposed yet,”

“imma beat that boy’s ass,” cass muttered, causing you to choke on your drink. you had no idea what was in joe’s mind, but you’ve had the marriage talk. you’ve talked about getting married and that you were meant to get married. he just hasn’t put a ring on it, yet.

catching up with them was always special. cass told you about her husband and her 3 year old at home. courtney told you about her business and the cute guy who works next to her. you shared struggles, the things that caused you to stumble. you had the opportunity to lift each other up, to fill each other’s cups in the time that you had.

after you’ve had your fill, three drinks in with a full belly, the three of you figured it was time to leave. you didn’t want to hold up the restaurant any longer, even if you guys didn’t want to leave.

“don’t freak out,” courtney started, which consequently unsettled your stomach.

“what?”

“there’s a guy who’s been staring at you for the past 5 minutes,” she whispered to you, concern furrowing her brow. you were used to people staring at you, especially since you were dating joe. people wanted to ask you questions, and they weren’t always of innocent intent.

you turn and meet eyes with the guy, who’s sitting by himself, a drink in front of him. he makes no move to break eye contact with you, but he does wink at you. it unsettled you, causing your stomach to bubble with anxiety. you didn’t like his expression or what he was insinuating.

“he’s probably just a fan. he shouldn’t follow us out,” you told them. you were comforting yourself, but your gut told you a different story. it told you that this guy had other intentions and he wasn’t going to leave you alone.

you pack up your things, pay the bill, and fill your mouth with the last of your drink before walking out. you flicked your eyes back over to the man again, who had moved closer to you. he was still staring at you, his eyes flicking over your body. he was checking you out, and it made you very uncomfortable. you shivered, walking out of the restaurant. before you left for dinner, you liked your outfit. it was cute, it was comfortable, and you felt confident in it. now, you tugged at the sleeves of your shirt, worried about any exposed skin.

the three of you gather in front of a window into the restaurant, a warm glow cast on your faces. you still felt eyes on you, the prickling sensation on the back of your neck confirming such. this was different, you knew that. you also knew that you parked in a different area than your friends did. that fact alone tightened your chest and labored your breathing.

you’d be fine. you could handle yourself.

“you ok?” courtney asked you, snapping you out of your trance.

“yeah, yeah. he’s just really freaking me out,” you admitted to them. courtney looked in the window, catching the guy who was staring at you. she made a face at him, breaking the eye contact he had with her. you couldn’t help but laugh, shaking your head.

“needed a little embarrassment,” she shrugged. you hoped she was right. even though you were in a happy relationship, it didn’t stop other guys from hitting on you. it didn’t stop other guys from ogling, from making sleazy comments. it didn’t stop them from denying reality, wanting you to be theirs. you hoped that this guy in particular just needed to be told to shove off.

the three of you started walking down the street. the sun was setting, golden hues lighting your way. you guys stayed together, laughing and giggling as you went. your eyes caught movement, and you turned your head to see the man from earlier walking on the sidewalk across from you. it had to be a coincidence. you didn’t say anything, chalking it up to be paranoia. you were with friends. joe was a phone call away. you’d be ok.

you take out your phone and unlock it, hovering a finger over joe’s contact. you decided against calling him, at least for now. you didn’t need to bother him with this right now. you reached their parking lot, and you looked back, seeing no sign of him. you let out a breath of air.

“it was so good seeing you,” you chirped, feeling in a much better mood. you hugged each of them before they departed to their cars. the deck you parked in was right across the street.

“you good to walk there by yourself?” courtney called from her car. you contemplated taking her up on her implied offer, but you shook your head.

“i’m ok, thanks. i’ll call joe while i walk over,” you reassured her. she smiled, getting into her car, and driving off. you were met with silence again. you watched your friends leave, and as your eyes followed their cars, you saw him again. your heart caught in your throat, your breath hitching.

this is how crime documentaries started.

you pulled out your phone again, not hesitating to call joe. your breath picked up, watching the guy down the street from you. he was leaning against the wall, lighting a cigarette. based off of the lighting of the fire hitting his face, he was white. he was wearing dark clothes and had dark hair. you kept those physical descriptions in your mind, just in case.

“baby?” you heard joe’s voice on the other side of the phone, grounding you.

“hey! i’m walking over to the parking deck and wanted to call you,” you explained, maybe a little too brightly. you started towards the crosswalk, which would make the walk to the parking deck a tad longer. you stole a look at the guy, and he’d put out his cigarette and started after you.

“are you ok?” he asked you. joe knew that you sounded off; something was up.

“um,” you started, glancing back as you crossed the street, seeing the mystery guy pick up the pace, “i need you,” your voice shook with the realization you were being followed. ruffles were heard on the other side of the phone, which meant silence.

“joe?”

“i’m on the way, just keep walking to the parking deck, i’ll be there in 15 minutes,” he informed you. he slipped on some shoes, grabbed his keys, and walked into the garage. he didn’t have to ask, you didn’t have to explain. he heard the shakiness of your voice, and that alone threw him into overdrive. no one messed with his woman, no one got away with scaring her.

he got into the car, opening the garage, and pulled out. all while on the phone with you.

“wait 15 minutes? isn’t the restaurant like 30 from the house?” you asked, walking into the parking deck. at least it was lit, but it didn’t ease the sickly feeling in your stomach. you turned back, watching as the guy just entered the parking deck. he wasn’t making it subtle.

“30 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever. if i get pulled i’ll sweet talk the cops out of a ticket,” he informed as he gassed down the street. his hand wrung against the steering wheel, his mind running a million miles an hour. he might even make it in 10 minutes.

“oh well that’s comforting,” you told him as you disappeared up the stairs. you skipped steps, reaching level 4. it was then you heard the door open and close. you bolted through the level 4 door, panting, your heart in your throat.

“joe, please hurry,” you’re begging, your mind coming up with escape routes and hiding places. that car is big enough to hide you. there’s a pillar over there that could keep you. there’s another stairwell on the other end.

“i’m coming baby, just hang tight for me, ok?” he hated hearing you sound so scared, he hated all of it. his anger boiled, his jaw working as he turned onto the highway. why did men think it’s fun to scare women? why did they think it was ok, that it meant they were interested? why did they get off on their fear?

“just stay on the phone with me, please?” you asked him, trying to eye your car. of course you forgot where you parked. you heard the door squeak, and your nerves lit up with adrenaline.

“i promise, babe. i’m here,” he assured you. you swallowed and parked yourself next to a random car, taking out your fob as if to unlock it. you wouldn’t let this man know what you drove.

“he’s on the same level as me,” you breathed shakily, trying and failing to keep your composure. you’ve only read of this sort of thing happening, you never thought it would happen to you. you tried to think logically, which would calm down your nerves only for a little bit.

“i’m almost there,” he told you. he pulled onto the same street as the restaurant, and he wondered why someone would even dare scare you. the area was well-lit, populated. there were people out and about, and yet this guy didn’t seem to care. it just enraged him even more.

you saw the guy round a corner, and you didn’t have anywhere to go. you stiffened, your back rigid as this man approached you. you could see more of his face, and you made sure to sear it into your mind. you could hear your heart beat in your ears, blood rushing through your body. your hands shook, and not because there was a chill in the air.

“can i help you?” you dared speak, trying to sound confident, to sound like you could knock him out if you wanted to.

“you left your wallet,” he replied. on the phone, joe listened, pulling into the parking deck. you were engaging in conversation with this man, and he just hoped that this guy didn’t want to do anything else.

“oh, thanks,” you took the wallet from him, your heart pounding. your eyes flicked to the ramp, watching as joe’s sleek porsche came into view. you almost cried with relief. joe parked in the aisleway, opening and shutting the door. he’d hung up the phone the second he pulled onto the level, preparing for whatever it was he was going to see.

“is there a problem?” joe’s voice is tight, his eyes are hard as he eyes this man down. he walked up to him, a certain strut to his stride. he looked taller, bigger, but maybe it was your mind playing tricks on you.

“i was just giving the lady her wallet back, man,” her follower defended.

“then why the hell are you still here?” joe snapped, stepping between you and the guy.

“she seemed afraid, wanted to make sure she was ok,” he replied, sounding smart. joe didn’t like his attitude, but he also knew a slug to the face wasn’t going to fix anything.

“she’s fine, so get out,” he snapped, his voice raising. joe was a good 4 inches taller than this other man, and it made you feel safer. joe squared his shoulders, the tension in his body building as he towered over the other man. you shrunk behind joe, praying for this moment to end. you took careful breaths, trying to control your surging anxiety.

“what the hell is your problem, man?” he snapped, and joe couldn’t hold himself together much longer.

“my problem?” joe hissed, inching towards the other man, “my problem is that you followed her here. my problem is that you’re just now saying something about a wallet,” joe was seething, his fists clenching and unclenching. he wasn’t going to say he scared you, he didn’t want him thinking he won in any way. no one should be proud of scaring someone or wanting to scare someone, unless it was joe in that moment.

“well maybe if she wasn’t running i would have been able to give it to her,” he argued. joe needed to breathe, to take a step back, but this guy was trying to justify his following you. it continued to boil his blood, to churn his stomach.

joe shoved this guy back, hard enough to give you some space, but not enough to knock him down.

“get the fuck out of this parking deck, i don’t want to see you again,” joe’s voice was gravelly as he stared this guy down. he watched as the man stalked off and left the parking deck. joe’s breaths were the only thing heard in the silence. he turned towards you, his expression immediately softening.

“you alright?” he asked, wrapping his arms around you, pulling you in close to his chest. you melted into his embrace, the safety of it. the tears finally fell, the adrenaline that once coursed through your veins slowing its pace. you held onto joe, but you wanted to get out of there.

“i’m ok now that you’re here,” you pulled away. he nodded, wiping your tears from your eyes. the pads of his thumbs felt cool on the heat of your skin, calming down the nerves in your body.

“good, let’s go home,” he hummed, kissing the top of your head. he walked you to your car, helping you in. you felt safe in your car; it allowed to finally breathe and release the tension in your chest. tears flowed down your cheeks you pulled out, following joe all the way home.

—

once you were home, enveloped in the warmth and smell of comfort, you changed into comfortable clothes. you were still shaken up, your body shaking from the adrenaline crash. you walked out of the bathroom, joining joe on the bed. he immediately wrapped you in his arms, giving you a gentle squeeze. he didn’t know what he’d do if he got there too late, if he got there and something despicable had happened. he’d lose his mind, that was for sure.

he just couldn’t get the sound of your voice out of his head. the sound of fear.

“feel better?” he hummed against your hair, pulling himself out of his own head. you nodded against his chest, listening to his steady heartbeat. his fingers ran up down your spine, spreading warmth throughout your body. you were safe. no one was going to hurt you.

“i’m still shaky, but i’m much better,” you admitted. he could feel your hands, the slight tremor to them as you laid against his chest.

“good,” he replied, running his hands up and down your back, “i’m always a call away,”

“i know,” you said, words muffled against his chest. silence rode by, safety once again seeping back into your bones. he was the one you ran to, the one you’d always call if you needed help. he’d always answer that call, too. your mind drifted with the returning feeling of safety, joe’s actions returning to the forefront of your mind. his tone, his body. you chuckled at the thought, curling further into him.

“what?” he asked, watching as you looked up at him.

“seeing you get all protective has me feeling some type of way,” you laughed, making joe roll his eyes. he kissed the crown of your head, a smile on his lips.

“i think it’s about time little miss got some sleep,” he smiled, reaching over and turning out the light. your laugh broke the darkness, bringing its own kind of light. he was thankful you were feeling ok enough to make suggestive jokes. hearing you laugh was one of the most healing things in his life.

“sweet dreams, my love,” he hummed, feeling you drift off to sleep, safe in his arms.

went overboard but i hope this is ok anon! please enjoy!! as always, i’m so thankful for your support and your love! you guys are amazing <3

tags: @wickedfun9

[worldisahouseonfire]

This really helps to read. There's a lot of pressure in institutions and congregate living situations to make friends with the other people there. But I don't do well with this sort of nonconsensual setup, where I can't actually get away from the would-be friends if I need a break from them to evaluate how I'm feeling about an interaction or connection.

Reminds me of something from a RealSocialSkills post called 'Autism awareness for aides,' something like "honest loneliness is better than being surrounded by people who everyone says are nice but don't treat you well or think you are real."

And something Terry Pratchett wrote in 'I Shall Wear Midnight,' about how sometimes two people are both outcasts but come to find out, painfully, that they're not outcasts in the same/compatible ways.

In my experience Autistics can be way more different to each other than non-Autistics are to each other. All of us being outcasts, or treated as 'weird' by normative society, does not necessarily mean that we have anything in common other than our exclusion. And that by itself can be a very painful thing to bond over. Especially in the absence of any independent enjoyment of spending time with one another.

But it still hurts and feels extra-isolating to be in congregate settings with other socially rejected people, and see that they are able to make friends and connections with one another. Especially with the overwhelming (sometimes unspoken) narrative that the whole reason we're isolated and stuck in these places is some lack of arbitrary and universal 'social skills,' so failure to get along with people who have been arbitrarily thrown together with me feels like a sort of universal social death sentence. Like I will always be surrounded by people I don't want as friends, and this social failure will be All My Fault.

This is why, though, I am so glad that most of my life I have had a computer and reached out online for social connection. My closest friends are sometimes two or three timezones away, or even on the other side of the world, but they remind me that with the right people, I'm not a total social failure. And that spending time with other people doesn't have to feel like being in a car wreck -- uncertain what happened, afraid it was somehow my fault, wondering what lengthy consequences I might be facing, not even sure if I'm hurt or how badly.

My friends far away show me how it feels to be myself with people, to let the soft animal of my body rest in the (virtual) presence of others. And we do more for each other than anyone I know in meatspace, not because we feel obliged to, but because it makes sense.

Without my laptop, I would not survive congregate and institutional living situations. I would not keep fighting and striving to get out and stay out, and support my friends in all their efforts to break free and stay free from coercive shared living situations.

It makes sense to not always be able to make friends in settings and places not of our choosing. Where the only thing we may have in common with others there is our inability to leave, to make different choices who we spend our days with. In school, in employment, in families, in neighborhoods and sometimes housing, we often have limited pools of people with whom we interact. The chances of them being My/Your/Our People are ludicrously small.

I think it's okay for it to be harder to find friends. Especially as an adult, and especially when going through rough times. It's okay to not make friends with people you have to spend a lot of time around.

(I hope so, anyway. 'Cause where I'm living, and who I'm living with right now, is *not at all* where I want to be.)

“Because I could see that all these kids were weird and even they didn’t accept me, I knew I was the strangest one of all.”

—

Sean Barron, There’s A Boy In Here

Describing what happened to him in institutions.  I once attempted to describe this phenomenon in a book review of someone autistic who’d managed to make a lot of friends in institutions.  I was trying to just say our experiences had been different, but he somehow managed to take it as an insult, and to get his blog followers to write about how wonderful he was for being able to do something I hadn’t been able to do.  Which, of course, made me feel even worse: Other autistic people were able to make friends in institutions, so why were such experiences so few and far between for me? Was I defective somehow, even for an autistic person?  Was I showing how i wasn’t the right kind of autistic person, the kind who in their teens could somehow manage to make friends because they were so sweet and nice? 

I wasn’t sweet and nice, I was weird and strange and sticking out in all the wrong directions.  And many times, I would come to a mental institution and within seconds everyone would judge me to be the ward outcast.  I’ve talked to lots of autistic people who had this experience.  It turns out it’s not rare after all, and it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us, it just means we’re not among the rare autistic people who do manage to make lots of friends in such places.  And they aren’t better than us, and we aren’t better than them, we’re just different.  But it took me a long time to be able to see this, especially with grown parents of autistic children, who should’ve known better, harping on a very young adult autistic person for saying hir experiences were different than someone else’s.

(via autiequotes)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The real problem with anonymity

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

According to "the greater internet fuckwad theory," the ills of the internet can be traced to anonymity:

Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theory

This isn't merely wrong, it's dangerously wrong. The idea that forcing people to identify themselves online will improve discourse is demonstrably untrue. Facebook famously adopted its "real names" policy because Mark Zuckerberg claimed to believe that "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity":

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/14/facebook-and-radical-transparency-a-rant.html

In service to this claimed belief, Zuckerberg kicked off the "nym wars," turning himself into the sole arbiter of what each person's true name was, with predictably tragicomic consequences:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

Facebook is, famously, one of the internet's most polluted reservoirs of toxic interpersonal conduct. That's not despite the fact that people have to use their "real" names to participate there, but because of it. After all, the people who are most vulnerable to bullying and harassment are the ones who choose pseudonyms or anonymity so that they can speak freely. Forcing people to use their "real names" means that the most powerful bullies speak with impunity, and their victims are faced with the choice of retreat or being targeted offline.

This can be a matter of life and death. Cambodian dictator Hun Sen uses Facebook's real names policy to force dissidents to unmask themselves, which exposes them to arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing. For members of the Cambodian diaspora, the choice is to unmask themselves or expose their family back home to retaliation:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/facebook-cambodia-democracy

Some of the biggest internet fuckwads I've ever met – and I've met some big ones! – were utterly unashamed about using their real names. Some of the nicest people I know online have never told me their offline names. Greater internet fuckwad theory is just plain wrong.

But that doesn't mean that anonymity is totally harmless. There is a category of person who reliably uses a certain, specific kind of anonymity to do vicious things that inflicts serious harm on whole swathes of people: corporate bullies.

Take Tinyletter. Tinyletter is a beloved newsletter app that was created to help people who just wanted to talk to others, without a thought to going viral or getting rich. It was sold to Mailchimp, which was sold to Intuit, who killed it:

https://www.theverge.com/24085737/tinyletter-mailchimp-shut-down-email-newsletters

Tinyletter was a perfect little gem of a service. It cost almost nothing to run, and made an enormous number of peoples' lives better every day. Shutting it down was an act of corporate depravity by some faceless Intuit manager who woke up one day and said "Fuck all those people. Just fuck them."

No one knows who that person was. That person will never have to look those people in the eyes – those people whose lives were made poorer for that Intuit executive's indifference. That person is the greater fuckwad, and that fuckwaddery depends on their anonymity.

Or take @Pixsy, a corporate shakedown outfit that helps copyleft trolls trick people into making tiny errors in Creative Commons attributions and then intimidates them into handing over thousands of dollars:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

Copyleft trolling is an absolutely depraved practice, a petty grift practiced by greedy fuckwads who are completely indifferent to the harm they cause – even if it means bankrupting volunteer-run nonprofits for a buck:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/02/commafuckers-versus-the-commons/

Pixsy claims that it is proud of its work "defending artists' rights," but when I named the personnel who signed their names to these profoundly unethical legal threats, Pixsy CEO Kain Jones threatened to sue me:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

The expectation of corporate anonymity runs deep and the press is surprisingly complicit. I once spent weeks working on an investigative story about a multinational corporation's practices. I spent hours on the phone with the company's VP of communications, over the course of many calls. When we were done, they said, "Now, of course, you can't name me in the article. All of that has to be attributed to 'a spokesperson.'"

I was baffled. Nothing this person said was a secret. They weren't blowing the whistle. They weren't leaking secrets. They were a corporate official, telling me the official corporate line. But they wouldn't sign their name to it.

I wrote an article about for the Guardian. It was the only Guardian column any of my editors there ever rejected, in more than a decade of writing for them:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/05/14/anodyne-anonymity/

Given the press's deference to this anodyne anonymity, it's no wonder that official spokespeople expect this kind of anonymity. I routinely receive emails from corporate spokespeople disputing my characterization of their employer's conduct, but insisting that I not attribute their dubious – and often blatantly false – statements to them by name.

These are the greater corporate fuckwads, who commit their sins from behind a veil of anonymity. That brand of bloodless viciousness, depravity and fraud absolutely depends on anonymity.

Mark Zuckerberg claimed that "multiple identities" enabled bad behavior – as though it was somehow healthy for people to relate to their bosses, lovers, parents, toddlers and barbers in exactly the same way. Zuckerberg's motivation was utterly transparent: having "multiple identities" doesn't mean you "lack integrity" – it just makes it harder to target you for ads.

But Zuckerberg couldn't enshittify Facebook on his own. For that, he relies on a legion of anonymous Facebook managers. Some of these people undoubtably speak up for Facebook users' interests when their colleagues propose putting them in harm's way for the sake of some arbitrary KPI. But the ones who are making those mean little decisions? They absolutely rely on anonymity to do their dirty work.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/04/greater-corporate-fuckward-theory/#counterintuit-ive

[rockpaperimpala]

So about Netflix's the Last Airbender....

I am literally so confused you guys. You made me think I would HATE this show. And I LOVED it. Me. Known perfectionist and hater.

Katara was lovely. Yes, she started as a more soft spoken character than her cartoon version, but she was still passionate and hopeful throughout, just visibly unsure of herself. I think people were thrown off by this actress' natural way of expressing herself, which is Different from animated katara for sure, but not bad. Then she spends the whole season growing in Confidence and Fire. I Adored her fight with Paku, it really did feel like a payout of the whole season's development, and the bending kicked ass!

The Bending Kicked ass!!! The martial arts was fun and fast and creative and exciting! It looked SO good. That alone would be enough reason for me to watch and enjoy any show.

Zuko's actor was fantastic. He really captured the rage and confusion of this 16 year old banished prince. And there were so many Added moments between him and Iroh wich to me enriched their relationship. Like YES! This is why I'm watching, to see more of them, to see things done a little differently.

Iroh facing the consequences of his actions at Ba Sing Se!! That's what I'm here for!

Zuko's relationship with the men on his ship! That's what I'm here for!

The Extra layers we get to Ozai manipulating his children!

Also no one is talking about Admiral Zhao, who I had SO much fun with. I feel like they slightly fleshed out his character in a really dramatic way, really developing the hubris and frankly insane grasping ambition of someone who would kill the moon. I completely enjoyed this wilder, less controlled version of him, who comes up through the season from basically nothing and no one!

I am OBSESSED with King BUMI and his anger and disillusionment with the world! Like this was SO real. Living a hundred years of futile war would do that!!!! It is one of my favorite changes to the whole series. This new layer of emotion and character depth is what I'm here for!

Sokka was SO funny. He literally had me laughing out loud so often. That actor GETs Sokka, and GETS the way his humor is delivered. And is also able to tap into the more vulnerable side of him. People said he was "obsessed" with leadership. WHAT? That is a young person trying desperately to do his best and to try and find his place in the world, to figure what he has to offer. I loved his pride at hearing the Mechanist say that he would make a good engineer, and the sweetness of the moment that Yue's father says that he can be a hero without being a warrior. Sokka does so much growth in this series, in understanding himself and life.

And his chemistry with Suki was adorable!! I even like him and Yue (who was a totally unexpected sweetheart, despite her terrible wig)!! Like he has that same ability that Sokka has in the original to Connect with people.

Aang was great! He WAS fun loving and sweet and funny. I don't know what you guys wanted. Cartoons are always bigger and more exaggerated than live action. People's eyes swell up an, birds fly around their heads, and there are funny sound effects. That larger than life quality is the strength of animation! You have to look for different strength in live action. Like the SUBTLETIES of the acting choices. This little actor brought so much kindness, innocence, and strength to Aang.

And I FELT his frustration at being asked to do this at 12, his fresh hope anytime it looked like someone more experienced would be able to help him and no one did, and that's why he didn't learn waterbending this season, because he kept waiting for an freaking ADULT to show him the way, to help him carry this immense burden, but every adult he meets asks him for help instead, asks him to carry it himself, and then the finale hits and he realizes that there won't be any adults helping, he does have figure this out himself, and he makes the hard choice, takes on responsibility more than his years and offers himself to the ocean spirit, and he might have been lost entirely if not for Katara!

And that counter running theme to the show pays off: that he doesn't have to do it alone. He may not have more experienced guidance, because the adults have let him down again and again, but his friends will be with him, and they will figure it out together!

This is there throughout the series! Katara tells him this about learning waterbending, when he says he still wants to wait. Bumi tells him this in the palace at Omashu, and Aang sees the faith he has in his friends repaid!

I like these changes! And the show still found time for silly fun adventures and character building moments.

The show was never going to be the animated original. That is already a Masterpiece, and it frankly did NOT need to be adapted at all. I did not WANT a live action adaptation. I was adamantly convinced I would hate it. But the changes that they netflix show gave are what I Iike most about it. If I want to see Zuko say "you rise with the moon, I rise with the sun," I will go watch the animated original, because that version is perfect. And now, if i want to see Zuko say "Lu ten would have been proud to have you as a father," and see iroh pull him into a tight hug, I can watch this live action version, which is very good too. I'm going to disagree with most of the people on here and say that the Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender, DOES capture the heart of what we liked about the original show. It's spirit, fun, excitement, and characters. And the changes made are the reason we should be watching.

[rederiswrites]

I wrote this out for FB and then thought I might as well share it here as well. So if you have ADHD, are a late-diagnosed adult with ADHD, and most particular if you are a person with a uterus and/or have children, this one might be for you.

...

Last couple of days have been a little...weird. Let's start at the beginning. Buckle up and learn something.

As many of you already know, I have ADHD. It's a condition with a PR problem--a lot of people, often even medical professionals, have a very distorted idea of what it does, and a very limited one. For starters, it's not about parenting, or lead paint, or lack of discipline. It's genetic, *highly* heritable, starts in childhood and persists throughout life, and is a sufficiently severe disability that it comes with a decrease in life expectancy of up to 13 years. It is a visible difference that can be perceived in brain scans. These are all, at this point, well established and thoroughly attested in the scientific literature. ADHD affects up to 5% of the population and appears across cultures. It is very common.

It's not just about lack of attention--in fact, plenty of medical professionals think the name should be changed, as in fact the problem isn't the volume of attention but the way we struggle to direct it. We are motivated by interest, and struggle to properly weight future goals and consequences, specifically because they are in the future. If the robin outside the window is more immediately rewarding to our brain, we will watch that, and not the teacher. Our ability to properly weigh the consequences of that choice is negatively impacted by our own biochemistry.

We struggle with many of what are termed the "executive functions", the self management systems of the brain. Degree and presentation varies from person to person, but initiating tasks, completing tasks, staying ON task, restraining impulses, emotional regulation, and working memory are among the things impacted. My working memory is notoriously horrible. When they send you those activation codes on your phone? I often have to go back and read them out several times to enter a six digit number. I have to stop and remind myself what I'm doing between every step of my morning bathroom routine, or making tacos. Sometimes I take off my glasses to put on my contacts, reset, and reach for my pill bottles while I still can't see. My long-term memory is also affected, with my husband de facto serving as the memory-holder of the family.

Another common symptom I personally experience is "time blindness", which can mean both that you have no "internal clock" that has a clear idea of the passage of time, and that our ability to properly weight the importance of things in the future is impacted. So, for example, I can know intellectually what's coming, but it takes some really complex and exhausting antics to actually focus and work on those things if they're more than a week or sometimes even a couple days away.

Without externally imposed controls, many ADHD people flounder and fail to meet social markers of success. Estimates of how many ADHD people manage to complete college range from 5% to 15%. Again: 5% to 15%! I have failed twice myself. WITH externally imposed controls, ADHD people often have to work far harder to make their brains do what is required, and either fail and develop an image of themselves as failures (usually with plenty of external help), or keep fighting and suffer crippling burnout.

To that point, ADHD is HIGHLY comorbid with a whole range of knock-on conditions, some of which stem from the same brain patterns that give rise to the ADHD itself, and others from the trauma of living with a disability, but they include very high rates of depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, social isolation, and addiction. I have dealt with depression, anxiety, and fibromyalgia my entire adult life. I have never ended up in the trap of self-medication but let's be real, that's partly about having supports and a healthy social environment. It's not some accomplishment I praise myself for, nor is addiction a sin I shame anyone for.

And anxiety has a very different texture to it when what you're really anxious about is the next time you fail in some catastrophic way. Lock your keys in the car. Completely space on a doctor's appointment. Go to pay for groceries and find that your wallet is next to your computer at home. Because the anxiety is not irrational fear of some generalized bad thing. These things do and will happen, regularly. Sometimes it feels like the only fix is getting good at recovering. Because no matter how many times you manage not to blow it, there's always another chance.

So, the struggle to be a reliable person, to be a consistent parent, to be a dependable life partner, is continuous. And it is so so so hard and it sometimes feels like you're not actually making any progress at all. I have tried therapy. I have tried three (or four??) different non-stimulant medications that sometimes help people. One of them DID help. ALL of them had catastrophic side effects. There were times as I was trialing these medications when I needed to be minded because I wasn't capable of taking care of anything, not even myself. Without Jacob, I don't know where I'd be. Not here. Probably in poverty, which is where he found me.

I have tried probably most organizational tools you know of. I have tried imposing schedules, all of which turned to dust and ash when the next fibromyalgia flareup or the next major life disruption happened. I don't think a new schedule has ever lasted a month before.

I HAVE felt like I'm made progress lately. I learned things that really helped my fibromyalgia, which gave me the space to work on other things--just like getting the borders of a puzzle finished. Enough things were spiraling upwards, and I think I might be cementing some gains. I have felt optimistic.

But in the meantime, I asked my doctor if, now that no less than three cardiologists have insisted my heart is Perfectly Healthy, I could finally try stimulant medications. After decades of use, Adderall, Ritalin, and a couple related stimulant drugs are still the gold standard for ADHD treatment and improve outcomes substantially for many people. And stimulants are in serious international shortage. Have been for many months. The only one she thought she could get me was Adderall. And she didn't dare try anything but the standard 30mg because nonstandard dosages would be even less attainable.

So now I'm taking Adderall. One week on 30mg, which I stopped when it was clear my function was being seriously impaired rather than improved. Reassessed with the doctor, now trying 60mg, because that's two of the pills I've already managed to obtain. It is....too much. And in some ways it fixes problems I wasn't working on, while so far making my executive function, my initiation or even *contemplation* of tasks, virtually nonexistant. Which was, of course, the thing I was trying to fix.

So yeah. When you have the context, I figure you can understand the substance of my frustration yourself. If you have children, I don't think you need my help to imagine what it would be like to know that you are unpredictable, or to see that your children are used to to you undergoing events that make you act strangely and erratically. I think just knowing that often, new medications introduce themselves by giving me a migraine, and I know this is possible when I take that first pill, is fairly self-explanatory. And so I expect you can imagine what it would be like, with all of this as a backdrop, to experience worsening of your symptoms, probably because of age-related hormonal changes. To in desperation try something you'd previously been denied. And to learn that it probably won't help.

In a week, I will either give up on Adderall for now or find a way to make it work. I'll put together the pieces yet again--at this point, possibly my strongest personal skill--and continue that upward climb as far as I can get. I'm incredibly fortunate in that regardless, I will be fed and dry and warm and loved. But right now, I feel justified in some serious dismay.

[lover-of-mine]

I NEED YOUR COLOR THEORIES ON BUDDIE MATCHING AND TOMMY LOOKING OUT OF PLACE COLOR-WISE AND THE "YOU WANTED THE RED ONE?" COMMENT THAT BUCK MADE LIKE I NEED IT RIGHT NOWWW

Hello my love, welcome to the madness!

First of all, this scene is 100% about Eddie, but for a second they try to make you think that it is about bt. They start with a very odd angle of Eddie's living room, I did not recognize it at first, so it kinda leads you to believe that we are about to get some domestic bt but then the camera quite literally does a 180 and we are suddenly focused on Eddie with Eddie in the middle, they are there to help create this illusion that Eddie is okay and everything is fine, just as much as the decorations that are only placed where Chris would be able to see.

We're also back to the triangle formation they were being put constantly during Buck's coming out arc, which is interesting in many ways, because they put Eddie in the middle, and while I don't love to put a lot of weight into interviews, both Tim and Oliver have talked about the way Tommy is not gonna interfere with buddie, so I'm intrigued about the role Eddie is gonna play within whatever "finding out uncomfortable truths" means.

I don't know how to fully form my thoughts about the scene as whole, but I know yall want me to talk color, and boy, do I have shit to say.

First off, Tommy's hat. I've been going kinda crazy trying to figure out if that damn hat is green or blue, because when I swatch it from different points of the scene, I get different undertones.

Currently, I'm working under the assumption that it is supposed to be a shade like this, like a dark petrol color, that is meant to be ambiguously blue and green.

Why would it be relevant for his color to be ambiguous in this context? Well, the complementary color to red is green and the complementary color to orange is blue.

I've talked about this a lot when talking about Buck and the way they use green as his something is wrong color, but the goal with complementary colors is to create contrast, so they are making Tommy contrast Buck and Eddie's, red and orange, hats. And there's also the way the letters and the streamer Eddie is holding are red. So while Buck and Tommy are the couple and Eddie is supposed to be the one outside, visually, Buck and Eddie are presented as a unity while Tommy stands out. There's also the way Tommy's lighter shades contrast Buck's darker.

They did something similar at the bachelor party, while the green and pink aren't exactly matchy from a color theory view, their outfits are explicitly stated as a matching costume, in pastel colors, contrasting the choice to put Tommy in a dark blue color, again with Eddie in the middle.

There's something about the way that Buck asks "I'm sorry, did you want to red one?" and Tommy completely ignores it in favor of turning the cones into a flirty comment, is that on a meta-level, since the party is red, and Buck himself wears red a lot, Tommy is yet again rejecting Buck's attempt to bring him in deeper into his life, to find that space where he would fit.

Something else just because this made Alli laugh, the decorations are red, but Tommy is blowing up a green balloon, and well, green is the breakup color and that is funny on its own, but considering the way the party is red, to have him with the opposite color balloon is yet another way to show the lack of effort, to make you aware he does not fit in with the Buckley Diaz family unity, and by consequence doesn't fit in in Buck's life.

But now talking Buck and Eddie specifically. Eddie is in a warmer version of the colors Buck is wearing. They match.

Even the red and orange thing we have going with the hats. Because red and orange are analogous colors, that means they are side by side in the color wheel, and they are meant to create a harmonious look, it's about cohesion, creating visual unity, it's the same principle the show uses to make the blue and green thing work (way too long meta on the blue and green), because since you have the same base color, it's easy to make them make sense together. (Also orange is red with yellow 👀 Eddie working his way to his yellow shade queer arc, I believe in you).

About Buck and the brown. Not a very Buck color. But it is interesting that we have Buck in brown when Eddie needs support and Buck wasn't there, when Eddie needs support and Buck is trying his best to fix it, and when Eddie needs support and finally asks for it.

Buck is here to be something for Eddie to rely on, and the color brown is used for comfort, stability in a positive setting. But also, negatively, brown is used for loneliness, so they are playing with both meanings here with the way they are both in brown.

Also about Eddie and the brown. Eddie wears a lot of earth tones, but that brown is entirely way too reddish for him. And it's something because during the whole Kim fiasco and when Chris leaves, he is in maroon, they used the color as an indication something is wrong.

So while Eddie is still trying to pretend he's fine, he is still partially in that red, from the shade to everything about the decorations.

So this was yet another way to establish Buck as Eddie's support system, and that Tommy doesn't fit in.

I think this is all, if you read all this, I love you 💜

Tagging the people who interacted with this about being tagged in my metas, you can do that too if you wanna be tagged

@sparkedblaze @caw-salem @dreamofsomepiphany @100ceruleaneyes @linus-lucy @chaosqueery @gina-spike @chimchiminie98 @elvensorceress @dangerpronebuddie @ijustdontlikepeople @182daysof @steadfastsaturnsrings @sparklespiff @inell

[ilovemilestellersmoustache]

I Bet You Think About Me

Braden Schneider x Reader x Matt Rempe

WC: 4.7K

Summary: Braden made a decision and he’s dealing with the consequences

A/N: This is gonna have multiple parts and ANGST

Braden Schneider sat at the edge of his bed, his gaze unfocused as he stared at the cluttered room in front of him. The sheets were tangled, a reminder of last night’s brief distraction. Another girl whose name he couldn’t remember, whose face would blur into a long list of hazy encounters. His friends had been insistent — every night they would tell him, “She’s way better than Y/N,” but none of it stuck. No one was better than Y/N, and he hated himself for even thinking that way.

He ran his hands through his hair, trying to shake the image of her from his mind. But it was impossible. Two years — two years of her laughter, her smiles, her soft hands wrapping around his when they walked the streets of New York City. They’d built something together, and he’d torn it all apart. She deserved better. She’d always deserved better. And yet, here he was, suffocating under the weight of a choice he wasn’t sure he should have made.

Y/N was always still going to be around, he knew this. Working as the Rangers’ media manager, she was impossible to avoid, and seeing her every day was a constant reminder of what he had lost. At first, he had thought it would be easy to move on. He’d been convinced they were too different. She was a small-town girl, used to the simplicity of life on a farm. It was all living room dancing and kitchen table bills. He, on the other hand, had grown up in a gated community, a life of silver spoons and privilege. It had seemed inevitable that their worlds would eventually clash. But they say you can’t help who you fall for. He’d thought ending it was the right thing. Better to walk away before things got harder, before the differences became insurmountable.

But it wasn’t just their lives that had been different. He had started laughing at her dreams, rolling his eyes at the little things that used to make him smile. He hated himself for that too. He had been cruel in ways he couldn’t take back, and when he ended it, he thought he was freeing them both. She had given him space, both at work and outside of it. She had respected his decision, even though he could see how much it hurt her.

And now… now there was Matt Rempe.

Braden had noticed it slowly at first — the way Matt lingered near Y/N in the locker room, the way he always seemed to be cracking jokes that made her smile, the way they stood just a little too close during post-game interviews. Braden tried to convince himself it didn’t matter. He was the one who had walked away, after all. He had no right to care anymore. But it did matter. It mattered a lot more than he wanted to admit.

At practice, Matt had started to get under his skin. It wasn’t anything intentional, not at first, but seeing him with Y/N every day, watching their easy camaraderie, drove Braden into a frenzy he couldn’t control. He’d begun to get aggressive during drills, checking Matt harder than necessary, throwing his weight around like it was a fight for dominance. The guys had noticed. They made jokes about how Braden needed to relax, how he was getting too wound up over something so simple.

But it wasn’t simple. Not to him.

The irony wasn’t lost on him. He had ended it with Y/N, and now here he was, losing his mind over the fact that someone else was getting close to her. He couldn’t stand the thought of Matt touching her, of hearing her laugh the way she used to laugh with him. He had to pretend like it didn’t bother him, but it was eating him alive from the inside.

Why had he let her go? That thought haunted him the most. The love he was looking for, the thing he was chasing in every meaningless encounter with another girl — it had been right in front of him the whole time. It had been Y/N.

He pulled himself up from the bed, pacing the length of his room as he tried to sort through the mess in his mind. His friends, his teammates, they had all told him that this was for the best. That Y/N wasn’t the right fit for his life, that there were plenty of other girls who could give him what he needed. But none of them knew her like he did. None of them understood the way she could light up a room, how her kindness softened the edges of his life, how her presence made him feel grounded in a way that no one else had.

The truth was, Y/N had been harder to forget than she was to leave. He had thought it would be easy, thought he could just walk away and never look back. But every day, every moment he saw her with Matt, he felt the cracks in his resolve deepening. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to be happy — he just didn’t want her to be happy with someone else.

And yet, who was he to interfere now? He had made his bed, and he was lying in it, tangled in regret and frustration. All the other girls had been distractions, temporary fixes to a problem that went deeper than he wanted to admit. He missed Y/N in a way that gnawed at him constantly, and no amount of casual hookups or parties could fill the void she had left behind.

Practice had been a disaster.

Braden stormed into the locker room, his chest heaving with frustration. The drills had been intense, but not nearly as intense as the fire burning inside him every time he caught sight of Matt. They had been going at it the entire session, tension crackling between them as they clashed during every scrimmage. It wasn’t just competitive anymore. It was personal.

Matt was sprawled on the bench, his long frame relaxed as he tossed his gear into his bag. Braden shot him a glare, but Matt didn’t seem to notice — or if he did, he was ignoring it.

“Dude, what’s your problem today?” Matt finally asked, raising an eyebrow. “You’ve been playing like you want to kill me.”

Braden gritted his teeth. He wanted to say it was nothing, that he was just pushing himself harder, but the words got stuck in his throat. He couldn’t stand how casual Matt was, how unaffected he seemed by everything.

“Just trying to win,” Braden muttered, shoving his helmet into his locker with more force than necessary.

Matt laughed, and the sound grated on Braden’s nerves. “You could try doing that without trying to kill me every time we’re on the ice together. ”

The casualness of Matt’s tone only made Braden angrier. He felt the tension build in his chest, his fists clenching at his sides as he tried to control the urge to lash out. But it wasn’t just about hockey. It was about Y/N. It was about the way Matt always seemed to be in her orbit, like he had some right to be there.

“I don’t need to kill you,” Braden said, his voice low and dangerous. “But you might want to watch yourself.”

Matt’s expression changed, his easygoing demeanor fading as he stood up and faced Braden directly. The locker room was quiet, the other guys watching the tension unfold between them.

“What’s your deal, Schneider?” Matt asked, his tone more serious now. “You’ve been acting like a total prick lately.”

Braden knew he was walking a fine line, but he couldn’t stop himself. He stepped closer, his jaw tight as he glared at Matt.

“You know exactly what my deal is,” Braden said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Stay the hell away from her.”

Matt blinked, clearly taken aback by the venom in Braden’s words. He frowned, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Are you serious right now? You’re the one who ended things with Y/N. You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

Braden’s hands balled into fists, and for a moment, he seriously considered swinging at Matt. But the rational part of his brain told him that would only make things worse — for him, for Y/N, for everything.

“She’s not a game, Rempe,” Braden said through gritted teeth. “Just… back off.”

Before Matt could respond, Braden turned on his heel and walked out of the locker room, his heart pounding in his chest. He couldn’t deal with this anymore. The frustration, the jealousy, the aching feeling that he had made the biggest mistake of his life — it was all too much. He needed to get away from it, from Matt, from the team, from Y/N.

But no matter how far he tried to run, the truth followed him. The love he had been looking for, the feeling he was desperately chasing in all the wrong places, had been right there all along. And he had let it slip through his fingers.

That night, Braden found himself back in the same situation — in bed with another girl, her presence a temporary escape from the mess inside his head. But even as she lay beside him, her soft breathing filling the room, all he could think about was Y/N. It was always Y/N.

The more he tried to forget her, the more she consumed him. Every smile she gave Matt, every laugh that wasn’t directed at him, twisted the knife a little deeper. Braden had never been the jealous type before, but watching someone else take his place in Y/N’s life was unbearable.

He rolled over, staring at the ceiling as the weight of his choices pressed down on him. His friends had been wrong. This wasn’t for the best. Nothing about this felt right. He had walked away from the one person who had ever made him feel like he belonged, and now he was paying the price

The air in the apartment felt heavy, oppressive. The girl next to Braden stirred, shifting closer, but he felt nothing. He was drowning in emptiness. No matter how many people he let into his bed, the void Y/N had left behind swallowed them whole. He wanted to shake the girl awake and tell her to leave, to get out before he dragged her down with him. But instead, he just lay there, motionless, consumed by the weight of his regret.

Braden grabbed his phone from the nightstand, scrolling through old photos of Y/N. He had never deleted them, couldn’t bring himself to. There they were, smiling together on her family farm in the middle of nowhere, the sun setting behind them. He had always hated how different their worlds were, how the simplicity of her life felt like a threat to the carefully curated reality he had built. He didn’t understand back then that it was that simplicity that had been his sanctuary. When all the stress washed away cause he was with her.

They’d danced in her parents’ living room one night after dinner, the dim light casting soft shadows as they swayed to a country song he didn’t even know. Y/N had laughed when he stumbled over the steps, but he could still hear the way she whispered, “You’ll get it,” and the way her fingers had laced through his so effortlessly, like they were made to fit together.

Braden could almost hear her voice, feel the warmth of her hand on his cheek. But now, it was only a memory, fading and blurring like everything else.

With a growl of frustration, he tossed his phone across the room, the sound of it hitting the wall sharp in the quiet. The girl beside him stirred again, this time waking up.

“Braden?” she murmured, her voice thick with sleep. “Are you okay?”

He sighed, running a hand over his face. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

But he wasn’t. Not even close. He could feel her watching him, could sense the confusion in her gaze, but he couldn’t explain it. He didn’t even know her name. She had been just another attempt to forget Y/N, another failed distraction.

“I should go,” she said softly, already sensing the distance between them.

“Yeah… I think that’s for the best.”

The girl got up, collecting her things in the dim light. As she left, the door clicking shut behind her, Braden felt the suffocating loneliness settle back into place. He stared at the ceiling, knowing that it didn’t matter how many girls came and went. None of them would ever be Y/N. He had known that the moment he let her go.

But knowing it now didn’t fix anything. It didn’t make up for the way he had pulled away from her, the way he had dismissed her dreams and her jokes as if they didn’t matter. It didn’t undo the nights when he had rolled his eyes at her, or the cold silence that had grown between them in the last few months. He had convinced himself they were too different, that their worlds couldn’t coexist. He’d told himself that walking away was the right thing to do, that they both deserved better.

But the truth was, he had been looking for a reason to leave. He had been scared. Scared of how much he needed her, how much he had started to rely on the way she made him feel. Y/N had been real in a way that nothing else in his life had ever been. She wasn’t like the girls who chased after him because of his name or his money. She saw through all of that and loved him anyway. And he had thrown it all away.

Now, every time he saw her with Matt, every time he saw the way she laughed and smiled at him, it felt like a punch to the gut. He had no right to be jealous, no right to be angry — but he was. He had thought that once they were apart, he’d feel free. Instead, he felt trapped in a prison of his own making, watching someone else live the life he had discarded.

Matt wasn’t a bad guy. That was the worst part. Braden couldn’t even hate him. He was one of the nicest guys on the team, always joking around and keeping things light in the locker room. But the way Matt hovered around Y/N, the way he made her laugh — it was unbearable.

Braden knew he had to get his head on straight. He couldn’t let this ruin the season, couldn’t let it destroy the bond he had with his teammates. But every time he saw Matt standing too close to her, it set off something deep inside him that he couldn’t control. The anger was irrational, burning hot and fast, and Braden hated it. But he couldn’t stop it.

He was the one who had left. So why did it hurt so much to see her moving on?

The next day at practice, the tension between Braden and Matt was thick enough to cut with a knife. The guys could feel it, sensing that something was off between the two of them. Braden knew he wasn’t hiding it well. His patience was razor-thin, and every time he saw Matt’s easy smile, it made him want to throw down right there on the ice.

Y/N was there too, her presence like a ghost haunting every corner of the rink. She was working, interviewing players, making sure the media was coordinated for the post-practice press conference. Braden tried not to watch her, but he couldn’t help it. She looked so at ease, so damn happy, like she hadn’t just had her heart broken a few months ago. She’d moved on. And he was still stuck.

The practice drills got more intense, the coaches pushing them harder as the upcoming game against a division rival loomed closer. Braden’s frustration boiled over when he and Matt ended up in the same scrimmage group.

They were skating down the ice, Matt with the puck, Braden closing in fast. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, the adrenaline and anger mixing into something dangerous. Matt made a move to pass the puck, but Braden didn’t care about the play. He angled his body and delivered a hit that sent Matt crashing into the boards.

The entire rink seemed to freeze.

Matt hit the ice hard, groaning as he clutched his side. The whistle blew, and the coaches yelled for them to cut it out, but Braden didn’t move. He stood there, breathing heavily, staring down at Matt like he was daring him to get back up.

“Gosh, Schneider, what the hell was that for?” Matt spat as he got to his feet, wincing from the impact.

Braden didn’t answer. He just stared, his fists clenched at his sides.

Matt shoved him back, his voice rising. “You’ve been acting like a psycho lately. You want to go? Let’s go.”

Braden took a step forward, ready to drop the gloves, but before anything could happen, the coaches were between them, pulling them apart.

“That’s enough!” Coach barked, his face flushed with frustration. “What the hell is wrong with you two? This isn’t how we play.”

Braden barely registered the scolding. His eyes were still locked on Matt’s, and in that moment, all he could see was red.

“Back off, Schneider,” Matt muttered, brushing past him as the tension slowly dissolved under the weight of the coaches’ reprimand. “I don’t know what your problem is, but you need to get over it.”

As the rest of the team moved back to their drills, Braden skated to the bench, sitting down and burying his face in his hands. He was falling apart, and everyone could see it.

After practice, Braden showered quickly, eager to avoid any conversations with the guys. He was about to leave the locker room when he felt a presence behind him.

It was Y/N.

She stood there, her arms crossed, her expression unreadable. Braden’s heart dropped into his stomach. They hadn’t spoken outside of work-related conversations since the breakup, and now here she was, staring at him like she saw right through the mask he’d been trying to wear.

“You need to stop,” she said, her voice steady but firm.

Braden swallowed hard, trying to keep his voice from cracking. “Stop what?”

“Whatever this is,” she gestured vaguely toward the ice where Matt was still talking to some of the other players. “I know you’re mad, but you don’t get to act like this. You broke up with me, remember?”

He winced at the reminder, the guilt crashing over him like a wave. “I know.”

“Then why are you acting like you didn’t?” Her voice softened, and for the first time in months, Braden saw a flicker of the girl he had once loved standing in front of him. “You don’t get to be jealous, Braden. You made your choice.”

His chest tightened. She was right. He had made his choice, and now he was living with the consequences.

“I didn’t think it would be like this,” he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper.

Y/N’s eyes softened, but there was a distance there, a wall that hadn’t existed before. “You thought it would be easy, didn’t you? Walking away.”

Braden nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“Well, it’s not,” she said, her voice sharp with the pain she had been carrying all these months. “But you can’t just punch your way out of it.”

“I’m sorry,” Braden whispered, the words feeling inadequate, too small to fix everything that had been broken between them.

Y/N stared at him for a long moment, the silence between them heavy and thick with all the unsaid words. Braden wanted to reach out, to pull her close and tell her he was sorry for everything — for laughing at her dreams, for rolling his eyes at her jokes, for making her feel like she wasn’t enough. But the words caught in his throat, and he knew that no apology would ever be enough to take away the hurt he had caused.

“You’re sorry?” she repeated, her voice low and full of disbelief. She shook her head, taking a step back, away from him. “You don’t get to be sorry, Braden. You don’t get to say that now. Not after everything.”

“I know,” he said, his voice breaking. “I know I screwed up, Y/N. I just—” He trailed off, running a hand through his hair, trying to find the right words. “I didn’t know it would be this hard. I thought… I thought we were too different, that it would be better for both of us if we—”

“If you left me?” she cut in, her eyes flashing with anger. “If you ripped my heart out and walked away without a second thought? Yeah, Braden, that’s really worked out well for you, hasn’t it?” Her voice was shaking now, and Braden could hear the pain buried beneath her anger, a pain that mirrored his own.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said quietly, hating how weak the words sounded, how inadequate they were in the face of everything that had happened.

Y/N laughed bitterly, crossing her arms over her chest. “But you did. You hurt me more than anyone ever has. And now… now you’re mad because Matt and I are friends? You don’t get to be jealous, Braden. You don’t get to care anymore.”

Braden felt the words hit him like a punch to the gut. She was right. He had no right to care, no right to be angry or jealous. He was the one who had walked away, the one who had decided that their differences were too much to handle. But every day, every moment he saw her with Matt, it tore him apart. He hadn’t realized how much he had relied on her, how much her presence had meant to him, until it was too late.

“I still care about you,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. It felt like the most vulnerable thing he had said in months. “I never stopped caring.”

Y/N’s eyes softened for a brief second, but then her guard went back up, the wall between them growing higher and stronger. “You don’t get to do that,” she said, shaking her head. “You don’t get to care when it’s convenient for you, Braden. You don’t get to decide when you want to be a part of my life after you pushed me out of yours.”

Braden took a step forward, his chest tight with desperation. “Y/N, please… I didn’t know it would be this hard. I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought we were too different—”

“You were scared,” she interrupted, her voice cutting through his words like a knife. “You were scared of how much you needed me. You were scared of what it meant to actually love someone. So you pushed me away, and now you’re mad that I’m not waiting around for you.”

Her words hit him like a slap to the face, the truth of them sinking deep into his bones. She was right. He had been scared. Scared of how much he had loved her, scared of what it meant to be vulnerable, to let someone into his life who didn’t fit the mold he had been raised to believe in. Y/N was everything he had ever wanted, but he had been too much of a coward to admit it.

“I know,” he said, his voice hoarse with emotion. “I know I messed up. But I can’t stand seeing you with him. I can’t—”

“You can’t what?” she snapped, her eyes blazing. “You can’t handle the fact that I’m moving on? That I’m not sitting around waiting for you to decide when you want me again?” She took a step closer, her voice rising with every word. “You ended it, Braden. You’re the one who said we were too different, that this wasn’t going to work. You made that decision. So don’t you dare try to act like you still have a claim on me.”

Her words cut deep, each one a reminder of the choice he had made, the life he had walked away from. And now, standing in front of her, watching the fire in her eyes as she fought to hold back tears, Braden realized just how much he had lost.

“I know I don’t have a claim on you,” he whispered, his voice thick with regret. “But I can’t help it. I miss you, Y/N. I miss everything about you.”

Y/N’s face softened for a moment, but she quickly looked away, shaking her head as if trying to keep herself from falling apart. “It doesn’t matter,” she said quietly, her voice barely audible. “It’s too late.”

The words hit him like a dagger to the heart. Too late. He had spent so many nights lying in bed, trying to fill the void she had left with meaningless encounters, trying to convince himself that he had made the right choice. But deep down, he had always known the truth. The love he had been looking for, the one he was desperately trying to find in someone else, had been Y/N all along. And now, it was too late.

Braden swallowed hard, his throat tight. “I didn’t know I could feel like this,” he admitted, his voice trembling. “I didn’t know how much I needed you until you were gone.”

Y/N looked at him, her eyes searching his face for a moment. Braden thought he saw something flicker in her expression, something like the love they had once shared. But it was fleeting, quickly replaced by the cold reality of their situation.

“It doesn’t change anything,” she said softly. “You made your choice, Braden. And now I’m making mine.”

She turned to walk away, and for a moment, Braden felt the urge to reach out, to grab her arm and beg her to stay, to tell her he would do anything to fix it. But he knew it wouldn’t be enough. He had hurt her too deeply, and now, no amount of regret could change the fact that he had pushed her away when she had needed him the most.

“Y/N,” he called after her, his voice cracking. She stopped but didn’t turn around. “I’m sorry.”

She stood there for a long moment, her back to him, and Braden held his breath, waiting for something, anything that would give him hope. But when she finally spoke, her voice was barely a whisper.

“So am I.”

And then she was gone, walking away from him for the last time.

The emptiness that followed Y/N’s departure was unlike anything Braden had ever felt before. It was a void, vast and cold, that swallowed him whole. He had thought that breaking up with her would free him, that it would make things easier. But instead, it had destroyed him.

He didn’t go out that night. He didn’t text his friends to find another girl to fill the empty space beside him in bed. He just sat in his apartment, staring at the walls, replaying every moment he had shared with Y/N in his mind. Every laugh, every touch, every quiet moment they had spent together in her tiny apartment or on her family’s farm.

It had been simple with her. Life had been quieter, slower. It wasn’t the fast-paced, glamorous life he had been used to, but it had been real. And now that it was gone, Braden realized that it was all he had ever really wanted.

He lay down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling as memories of Y/N played on an endless loop in his mind. He could still hear her laughter, still feel the warmth of her body next to his. But no matter how tightly he clung to those memories, they were slipping away, fading into the background of a life he had chosen to leave behind.

The other girls had never meant anything. They had been placeholders, temporary distractions from the overwhelming pain of losing the one person who had ever made him feel truly alive. But no matter how many nights he spent trying to drown out the emptiness, the truth remained the same: he had lost Y/N, and there was no getting her back.

He thought about what she had said. “You were scared.”

She had been right. He had been terrified. Terrified of how much he needed her, terrified of what it meant to let someone so completely into his life. He had told himself that their differences were too much, that they couldn’t last because their worlds were too far apart. But that had just been an excuse, a lie to cover up the fact that he was afraid of how much he loved her.

And now, it was too late.

A/N: Go to my page for part 2

[sweetbunpura]

Filled with Static...

Summary: Yuu was already fed up before coming to Playful Land and now that it's over... She has some very choice words for she has reached her boiling point...

Sorry in advance~

Yuu watches with hollow eyes as Fellow and Gidel depart without having to face the consequences of their actions. Everyone jokes around her about what they just went through, but static is rapidly and quickly filling Yuu's ears. She moves away from the group and makes her way down a street, unaware of the sound of footsteps behind her. A hand lands on her shoulder and she's quick to slap it off.

"Ow, rude much?"

Yuu turns to see Ace with his arms crossed. "What?"

"Just wanted to know why you took off like that."

"Why do you care?"

"Wow, jeez." Ace scoffed. "I knew you were snippy from the start, but I thought that would've cleared up. What's the big deal?"

"What's the big deal? What's the big deal!?" Her voice echoes throughout the small area of the docks. "Ace, are you fucking blind as well as a total fucking moron!?" She jabs her hand to where Playful Land used to be. "We almost got turned into puppets and sold off because of you guys!"

"Hey, we got out in the end!"

"No, we didn't. If Fellow hadn't gotten that phone call, we'd be goners." The others have stopped a few feet away, but Yuu ignores them. "And you're cracking jokes about it."

"Well, destroying the park was-"

"I mean about the whole thing, you brainless baboon." She snarls. "From the start, you ignored all the fucking warning signs that said you should stay far away from this man. Did Azul tricking you not ring any bells in that empty head of you?" She tapped her finger against Ace's forehead. "And even when you were told that the warning signs were blaring red, you still ignored them."

"Hold on." Ace growled. "Why am I getting signaled out?"

"Oh it's not just you, Ace." She points behind him. "It goes double for those cacophony of idiots."

"Wow, rude, Yuu-chan..." Cater mutters.

"I get that you guys are like this. It's all fun and games to the ones who can use magic." She shakes her hand in a mocking way. "But this is just another scar on my body that I do not need." She pulls up her sleeves to show the overblot scars...as well as a new wooden looking scar on her wrist. "You guys think this is a joke, when it's not. You're risking my life with your guys shit."

"You came with us!" Ace argues.

"Cause I had to make sure my useless excuse for a fucking cat didn't keel over and die!" Yuu shouts and begins shoving Ace. "You. Treat. Me. Like. I'm. Expendable." She pushes him back. "I'm a living being too, jack ass, what I have done to warrant being treated lower than dirt? Every time this happens, and I almost lose my life in the process... how many more times is this going to be an almost before it actually happens?"

The red head narrows his eyes and snorts. "If you hate it here so much, why don't you just go back home?"

"Ace..." Lilia tries to say but is cut off by Yuu socking Ace in the face and sending him to the ground.

"NEWS FLASH, ASSHOLE!" The look in Yuu's eyes are murderous. "I'VE BEEN TRYING TOO! YOU GUYS CAN JUST CALL UP YOUR FAMILY OR SEND THEM A QUICK TEXT TO CHECK UP ON THEIR WELL BEING! YOU'RE A PORTAL AWAY FROM HOME! I HAVE NOTHING, I GOT NOTHING, I HAVE NO FAMILY HERE AND I AM REMINDED OF IT EVERY DAY BY YOU GUYS AND BY CROWLEY!" Tears well up in her eyes. "I've had it here. I'm gone. I'm leaving NRC, I'm getting far away from you guys." She turns to leave and rubs her eyes. "Enjoy the rest of your fucking lives."

"Yuu-chan!"

"Shrimpy!"

"Herbivore, come back!"

"Potato!"

"Henchhuman!" Grim tries to follow after her only to lower his ears and back up as she shoots the darkest glare she can muster at him. "I'm....I'm..."

Yuu disappears into the morning crowd that had gathered to learn what the commotion was about. She did not return to NRC that day...rather Crewel had found her, curled up outside his temporary house.

"Oh, Pup...." He pulls his coat off, wraps it around the crying young lady, and helps her inside.

[yuesya]

“The Zenins finally named an heir?”

“Yup, seems like they finally got around to it,” Satoru laughs. “Or maybe their clan head just did it on a whim?”

It’s an amusing thought. The current head of the Zenin Clan is an extraordinarily difficult person to pressure into doing anything –as this sort of thing tends to be, when the person in question is apparently of the opinion that ‘murder’ is an excellent solution to most of her problems. For all that the Gojo elders are constantly grumbling over how the Zenins’ clan head should technically belong to them and not the Zenins, Satoru doesn’t doubt that there are a number of them who are also quietly relieved by not having to deal with someone who has no qualms about killing and isn’t afraid to make her stance obvious. Or act on it, for that matter.

Suguru tilts his head. “The Zenin clan head… oh, I think I remember her. She came around the Tokyo campus once before, didn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Satoru grins at the other boy. “You asked me if she was one of my clansmen, remember?”

Suguru flushes slightly in embarrassment as he snaps, “Well how was I supposed to know? The two of you really do look alike, I can’t be the only one who thinks that!”

“Mhm. You’re definitely not the only one.” Zenin Shiki has what’s considered the ‘classic’ Gojo look, all silvery-white hair and light coloration, instead of the Zenin appearance. Ebony hair and eyes, as dark as the shadows that the Zenins pride themselves in.

That still doesn’t change the fact that she’s a Zenin and not a Gojo, though.

“Sorcery clans tend to intermarry with each other,” is all he offers in explanation to his civilian-born friend. Usually, when there are such unions between well-established bloodlines of equal standing and prestige, there are certain vows in place –such as children being returned to the mother’s clan should they turn out to have inherited signature techniques from the mother’s side of the family.

In the case of Zenin Shiki, however, the Gojo Clan discovered that there was a loophole. She possessed cursed eyes, yes, but they were unprecedented in the long history of the Gojo Clan. Therefore, as the Gojo Clan had not demanded that all children possessing cursed eyes be relinquished to them as part of the vow, it stood to reason that new abilities born of the union would be considered as belonging to the Zenin Clan.

To be fair, cursed eyes were rare, and the only real case that still existed among sorcerers in this day and age was the Six Eyes. Which were rare enough already, and usually only found in the Gojo Clan’s main family.

No one had thought that there would be a Zenin granddaughter of a Gojo-Zenin union resulting in a pair of new cursed eyes.

The Zenin elders had probably been unbearably smug about the whole thing, up until they’d been slaughtered by the girl when she ascended her position over her former clan head’s cooling corpse. After which it had probably been the Gojo elders’ turn to wipe their brows and be thanking their lucky stars over having narrowly dodged a bullet there.

Or not, as the case may be; there were still some old fogeys laboring under the impression that the Zenin Clan had simply ‘raised the child wrong’ and that she would’ve turned out to be so much better had the Zenins admitted their own inadequacies and surrendered custody of the girl to them.

Pfft.

Well, it wasn’t as if any of them could turn back time. What’s done was done, and now they had to live with the consequences of their decisions.

Interesting choice for Zenin Shiki to name Zenin Naoya as her heir, though.

Ordinarily, a new clan head who’d supplanted their predecessor through force would want to establish their own bloodline as the new ruling family, but clearly Zenin Shiki had foregone picking one of her close cousins to be her heir. None of them had been specifically elevated to positions of power, either. She herself also had not chosen to marry into one of the more influential Zenin bloodlines as part of an alliance through marriage.

The only strength I need is my own, was the message that Satoru was seeing here.

… Or perhaps not? After all, the unexpected choice of Naoya as heir was definitely going to give people thoughts. Especially those who’d been very unhappy when Zenin Naobito, the previous head of the Zenin Clan, had been killed by a small slip of a girl. A girl who was distinctly Gojo-looking in appearance, despite her Zenin blood –the Zenins likely still had hang-ups about their clan head being killed by a Gojo, given the… historical precedent behind such a thing.

Hmm.

… Well, whatever game Zenin Shiki was playing here, it didn’t have anything to do with Satoru. And hey, maybe she wasn’t playing any games at all –maybe Zenin Naoya was just the strongest Zenin in the younger generation, and she’d made her decision based on that?

Who knows?